Employee engagement – Page 13 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 30, 2022

Love/Hate

There is much about being in charge of a company that every owner loves:

being part of a team,
working towards a common purpose
camaraderie
feeling that you’re not on your own
seeing ideas come up from others – better than any you could have dreamed up
seeing people grow and develop as a result of working with you – not just at work
Seeing your vision come to life.
The feeling of ‘I made this’.

There is also much about being in charge of a company that every owner seems to hate:

telling people what to do
making sure that they are doing it
worrying about whether they will do it properly
checking that they have done it properly
doing it again yourself when they haven’t
telling them they didn’t do it properly
telling them (again) how you want it done
dealing with disappointed clients
performance reviews
finding and hiring the right people
seeing them go
being the last to leave
being the last to have a holiday
being the last to be paid
not getting to do any of the ‘real’ work

What if you could have the bits you love, without the bits you hate?

You can, if you think about where the bits you hate come from.

If you were building an office block, or putting on a play, or making a film, you would have something that told people exactly what it is you’re trying to create. You’d have plans, a script and stage directions, a storyboard. If you were writing a symphony you’d have a score.

These things don’t just describe the outcome, they document how it is arrived at.

It’s not the bricklaying or the carpentry you’re worried about, you know your team know how to do that. What you’re worried about as an owner is the look and feel of the thing, the experience the audience – your client – will have of the finished article.

When you started your business you lovingly and painstakingly handcrafted the client experience yourself, in collaboration with the people who ‘got’ what you can do for them.

You expanded your business first by freeing up more of your own time – by handing over specific jobs that require specialist skills – bricklaying, joinery, accountancy, hr, phone answering. These are generic jobs, with their own rules that specialists learn. But there comes a point where you have to hand over parts of the customer experience itself, whether that’s sales or delivery.

This is where the problems start.

The solution is startlingly simple.

Create a description of the customer experience and how to deliver it, that ensures everyone starts from the same level of understanding as you.

That way everyone gets what they love.

June 20, 2022

Going with the grain

We’re often told that left in a ‘state of nature’, humans would end up fighting a ‘war of all against all’, leaving life ‘nasty, brutish and short’.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen any evidence of that, not even in the dodgiest part of Manchester in the high-unemployment, welfare-cut-ridden 1980s.

This story is used (has been used for millenia) to justify hierarchy. ‘Someone needs to be in charge, because otherwise everying will go to pot.‘ And with hierarchy comes inequality. ‘I’m at the top, so I deserve more‘.

As I’m working through Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s ‘Mothers and Others‘, it’s becoming clear that flexibility, empathy, mutual care and co-operation aren’t just useful human traits, they are literally the traits that made us human. These behaviours evolved before our bigger brains, before language. They made our bigger brains possible. Without these behaviours, we would still be great apes, or extinct.

So a flexible, co-operative mindset based on empathy and care for others, including those currently ‘unproductive’ comes naturally to us. Anything else goes against the grain.

Suppressing our nature isn’t just bad for people’s mental health, it’s bad for business, and right now it’s sending us down the road to extinction.

We’ll need to mobilise all our natual proclivities for teamwork, ingenuity and mutual aid to prevent this.

And we’re out of practice.

That’s where small businesses come in.

Where better to get practicing empathy, co-operation and mutual support than a business that already feels more like a family than a corporation?

Who better to kick off this transition in the UK than the 1.2 million ‘bosses’ of family-sized businesses?

When better to start than now, when it’s not too late?

And why not, when you can grow your business with the grain instead of against it? Giving your business an evolutionary advantage, enabling scale without adding overhead or stress or losing what makes it unique?

Discipline really does make Daring possible.

June 15, 2022

Catching on

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” David Graeber.

For many of us, this is exactly why we start a business. To build our own little utopia, where we make the rules, and get to decide how our world within a world should work.

But if we want to make a bigger impact, our model of how the world should work has to catch on. With clients, with team members, with suppliers, investors, our families and friends, our competitors.

That can only happen once the model is outside of our heads.

The good news is that getting it out of your head makes it easier for it to catch on.

June 14, 2022

Dictatorship

“This is not a democracy, it’s a benevolent dictatorship.”

As kids we occasionally questioned the benevolence. My mother must have questioned the dictatorship. Often.

Because more often than we sullenly submitted to some arbitrary (to us) command, we found ways to do exactly what we wanted. Mostly by simply doing them out of sight.

Looking back, its clear that much of this dictatorship came from inability, not unwillingness. We simply couldn’t afford stuff. But talking about this would have meant explaining why we couldn’t afford it, which in a nutshell was because there were too many of us for the income. And my parents never wanted any of us to feel unwanted or unloved.

Still, a bit of participatory democracy might have made things easier. We could have come up with ideas for saving money and priorities for spending it that we all agreed on.

It’s often said that small businesses are like families. And as ‘The Boss’, it seems easiest to run things as a ‘benevolent dictatorship’. But how much is going on out of your sight? How many good ideas are you losing? How much help are you missing out on?

Dictatorships, no matter how benevolent, aren’t just unfair. They’re inefficient and fragile. And in the long run, unsustainable.

Participation makes daring scalable.

May 12, 2022

And what about everyone else?

It’s not often I think that Seth Godin is being ungenerous. But I think he is in this post.

Of course Seth is writing for his tribe, those with what Shelle Rose Charvet would call an ‘Options’ preference. Who love uncertainty, exploration, overshooting boundaries and blank sheets of paper.

But not everyone works like that. A few like to slavishly follow a process step-by-step. Most of us like to have a map. Or a score we can interpret in our own way.

That doesn’t make us want to be a cog in a machine without responsibility or accountability. It just means we like to see where we are, where the destination is and what the possible routes are. We are perfectly willing to take responsibility, be on the hook, initiate action. It’s just that like children, we play more freely when we can see the boundaries.

Industrial control was never the answer to human flourishing, but neither is a void.

A little bit of discipline makes a lot of daring possible.

April 14, 2022

Why humans love change

Listening to ‘In our time’ this morning, I heard that one of the reasons our ancestor Homo Erectus emerged could be that the Rift Valley environment around them started to change relatively rapidly and unpredictably as a result of volcanic activity.

This created a new evolutionary ‘niche’ – for a species that was able to efficiently switch between environments rather than adapt efficiently to just one. Walking upright, sociality and speech are just some of the outcomes.

In other words, we’ve evolved to live in the midst of change.

To be sure, most of us prefer our change to be evolutionary rather than sudden and drastic, but I bet there’s hardly anyone you know that hasn’t undergone some sort of major shift (changed job, changed marital or parental status, moved house) in the last five years. We are programmed to explore possibilities, see opportunities, to talk about new things, to try them out – with others if we can.

Why then do corporates have such a problem with change management?

Because we’re human. We love change but we prefer to do it ourselves, than have it done to us.

April 11, 2022

What everyone really wants

What do your people really want?

The same things you do:

Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, with meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

If you escaped corporate life to set up on your own, you’ve almost certainly found that having these things at work didn’t just make you happier, it made your work better too.

Pass it on. It will be worth it.

March 18, 2022

Recipes

When you first write down your Customer Experience Score, it’s likely to be very like a recipe – a set of detailed, step-by-step instructions to create a very specific outcome.

That’s great. Recipes can be a great way for you to get stuff out of your head, and for people to build confidence.

But they can also become a trap that undermines confidence. If people have never learned the basic techniques and methods that underly any recipe, its easy for them to become reliant on having exactly the right ingredients, the right pots and pans, the right equipment and the right actions, in the right order…

That makes for a lot of work, a lot of shopping, a lot of planning and a lot of anxiety too, which makes cooking a joyless activity for many.

Cooking doesn’t always have to be ‘fun’, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be relaxed, exploratory, and sometimes, surprising. By understanding the patterns hidden in recipes, we can start to play with them, tasting and learning as we go, until eventually, we can improvise a nourishing meal out of whatever we happen to have in the kitchen.

The same is true for your Customer Experience Score – recipes can be a great start. But results will get better if you allow people to tweak and experiment and improvise a little. Just make sure to ‘taste as you go’ and things will be fine. Eventually, people won’t need the recipes, they’ll be able to improvise a great customer experience with the resources around them and the customer in front of them.

Who knows? One day, their Bara Brith will be even better than yours.

If you’d like to become an effortless cook, my friend Katerina is running a workshop next weekend.

I did this and it honestly changed my life.

February 1, 2022

Smarter than we thought

It’s long been assumed that people find it harder to compare between high-value options than between low-value ones. To put it concretely, we’re supposed to find it harder to compare a £350,000 house and a £355,000 house, than to compare a £90,000 house and a £95,000 one.

The idea is that although the size of the difference in value might be the same in both cases, as the proportion of the difference shrinks, comparison becomes harder.

It turns out this assumption is wrong. In a recent study, researchers found that not only are we more accurate in our selections, when more value is at stake, we can also be fast. And when we are given context – in other words, we know there’s a lot at stake – we consciously slow down to make our decision better.

This has some implications for pricing. You can’t take a ‘nobody will notice the extra £xxx’ attitude. People will expect to see higher value for a higher price, and they can tell the difference.

Perhaps more interesting are the implications for delegation. We’re smarter than we thought.

You can trust your people with bigger decisions than you might have assumed. Especially if you give them the context to make them in.

January 25, 2022

Our best selves

Being ‘all of yourself, to everyone, all of the time‘ is what we might call being our ‘best selves’, our ‘whole selves’.

If you want your people to bring that ‘whole self’ to work, you have to make sure the work feeds it properly:

logical and creative,
thinking and feeling,
independent and communal,
autonomous and collaborative,
leading and following,
familiar and innovative,
left brain and right brain,
etcetera,
etcetera,

If you only use half the person, you’ll only get half the job.

In other words, the work needs to empower them to be fully human.

The investment pays off. Handsomely.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Employee engagement